Glass

Has anyone figured out how to make convincing architectural glass in V-ray yet? I am really struggling with it. The materials shipped with V-ray are not cutting it for me and would love it if someone could share their material or settings. All the tutorials out there are for other programs and our interface does not match theirs.

I think this forum would be a great place to start a materials swap. It takes a long time to develop viable surfaces for our individual needs and we all probably need good starting setups to work from.

I find for example that it's tricky to get the correct coatings for external windows - we use a lot of differently coated laminate & double glazed window glass here in Australia and the colour of the sun light can have a significant effect on how the eventual look and feel works out.

Also existing VRAY material files are often in VISMAT format on many materials resource websites and we cannot use them for this implementation of Vray.

Maybe we could start a thread that is just VRMATS with sample renders of some standard objects?

btw as a note - i have found that simply renaming .vismat files to be .vrmat will often work.

However i have also found that if you try to copy and edit these in the vrmat editor provided with he VRay FormZ plugin that when you save them you will find them to not work correctly. If you open a mat file in a text editor it will quickly show you if the file is inherently vismat or vrmatin the first line.

I would interested to know what the visual issues are that you are having with the glass.

Here are 2 test renders showing a glass setup I'm now using for general windows and related highly transparent structural glass objects. I'm finding that the lighting types and shape and thickness of the objects significantly change the overall feel of the glass. For example I've been having more success with building the windows as laminate with a slightly more opaque central core and actually adding 2 layers of glass to make up a more realistic double glazing.

I'm just using a bunch of random shapes and typical objects here. There is a single panel toughened glass sheet with aluminium edge moulding and some double glazed panels. The 2 renders are raw straight from vray and one is using a single dome light while the other is a single simple distant light. You can see that subtle edge lighting and softer shadows with the dome whereas the distant creates a hard shadow and also harder colouring. I can load up the VRMAT file i created for it if you are interested.

I think this forum would be a great place to start a materials swap. It takes a long time to develop viable surfaces for our individual needs and we all probably need good starting setups to work from.

I find for example that it's tricky to get the correct coatings for external windows - we use a lot of differently coated laminate & double glazed window glass here in Australia and the colour of the sun light can have a significant effect on how the eventual look and feel works out.

Also existing VRAY material files are often in VISMAT format on many materials resource websites and we cannot use them for this implementation of Vray.

Maybe we could start a thread that is just VRMATS with sample renders of some standard objects?

Using the newest build/release, I have found that VISMAT files will load in FormZ now. At the Select Material dialog, you need to change the "Files of type:" drop down to "All Files (*.*) instead of the default (*.vrmat).

The Vray material editor within formZ is really unusable, at least for me. It's 1990's-dial-up slow. I've been trying to create my own material library and it just seems impossibly slow. There must be something wrong with the way I'm going at it. Any pointers anyone can give me would be appreciated.

I'm really disapointed that they've released this plugin with this obvious problem. Maxwell was great at this. Very few times do I remember problems editing materials.

Yes, the material editor and material loading is very slow. You are not doing anything wrong. The material editor is still a very strong contender to Maxwell's and hopefully they will get this sorted out soon.

I'm not finding the actual editor slow - just the sequence of the whole process of opening the editor as a new instance of the editor application each time you want to change a tiny detail.

It would make more sense to have the editor stay open once the material editing process has been initiated - instead of closing the app when you close a material.

And then close it on quit of FormZ.

Also the referencing inside the materials files need to be altered so that for example when you duplicate and rename a material it does not retain all the old internal references to the original material. We should not have to open and edit the file with a text editor to fix this.

Hi, I can't seem to find a mirror material. I have resorted to using polished chrome but its a poor substitute. Any suggestions are appreciated. Perhaps I'm just missing something. Its difficult and time consuming to have to hoover over a material to see its full name.

You will need to select a starter material and then tweak it to your situation.

As this system tries to emulate real life and a mirror effectively is a sheet of glass with a metal reflector behind it you could start with either of those materials or combine them.

I would start either with a transparent basic 'glass' material if you want a more subtle and transparent look and dial back the opacity and colour

or 'silver polished' if you want a fully opaque reflection effect and then tweak the surface attributes for lighting effects as it is trying to look like a 'real life' metal surface.

eg.

Simply select a material - say the basic glass.and copy the material in the formz materials editor - rename it as MirrorGlass.vrmat and open the VRay material editor.

in this case in the basic settings just change the fog colour to a full white and push the IOR up to about 10 or more and save and try a quick render.

or if going with the metal - start with Silver_Polished and when in the editor play with the colour of the reflection and maybe add some white to the refraction for a secondary reflected surface effect.

And if you add the two together and put a layer of glass in front of a polished silver you will get even more options to work with.

here is quick render with those 3 options showing the effects with he generic provided materials

Left polished silver - middle is a sheet of glass in front of polished silver - right glass only.

You will need to play with the glass settings as you might notice that some basic materials use an image or grid system that ends up creating a moire effect in combination with some other surfaces.

And also here are some experiments i;ve been doing with the layering of glass and materials to get facsimiles of coated and laminated glass that match industrial suppliers. I find it useful to logically combine them and get depth rather than spend time trying to make one material that does it all. Effectively what we are doing is creating a simulation of what we feel things should look like rather than what they actually look like with optical physics. These surfaces are using up to 3 sheets of glass like laminated glass or double glazing as indicated with he sample material spheres.